Not the least of the benefits of automating libraries and information
centers is the enhanced ability to monitor processes and services, to collect,
structure, analyze, and report critical or useful data hitherto largely
unavailable or excessively difficult and costly to obtain. Good management
of information requires good management information
information that is as cogent, correct, current, clear, concise, and complete
as cost effectiveness and enlightened decision-making demand. Computeraided
information systems offer not only opportunities to gain new
insights into the services they support; they challenge the systems designer
to build in the feedback necessary to control and improve the systems
themselves.
The focus of this paper is computer-supplied management information
in the special library environment. The particular context is that of an
extensively computerized, corporate library network in a large research
and development organization Bell Laboratories.

Issue Date:

1982

Publisher:

Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Citation Info:

In F.W. Lancaster, ed. 1982. Library automation as a source of management information: Papers presented at the 1982 Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing. Urbana, Il: Graduate School of Library and Information Science: 128-147.